


in tones so sweet and low

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 09:02:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are days Sarah wishes Steve had never brought Jamie home, because if he hadn't, she wouldn't love both boys enough to break their hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in tones so sweet and low

**Author's Note:**

> As always, these are reposted from tumblr and all sacrificial offerings go to cabloom for betaing. Title stolen from a lullaby, because I needed something with mothers and was quite frankly out of ideas.

The first time that she noticed it, Sarah hoped that her eyes were playing tricks on her.  She’d been on her feet all night, after all, stumbling home into the sunrise, her head pounding in time to the rhythm of her feet on the pavement.  Up all day before that, too, scraping together enough ice to throw in the tub with her fevered son.

She wouldn’t have gone to work, but there were bills to pay, and anyhow, Jamie wouldn’t leave Steve’s side.

Normally Stevie’s good ear could hear her coming from the bottom stair, but Mayor LaGuardia was knocking down buildings left and right, and their block was loud with the sound of diesel engines rumbling to life.  So Sarah stood in her own doorway, unnoticed, as Jamie pressed a kiss to her son’s pale forehead.

That, Sarah didn’t mind.  She was the one who’d taught the boy to test for a fever, after all.  And she’d known for years that Jamie –

“You missed,” Stevie rasped, and tugged his best friend down for the kind of kiss that tightened Sarah’s jaw.

“I’m home,” she trilled, too enthusiastic but too tired to be faking any emotion.  Still, it had been a long night, and she might be delirious – or maybe Steve was, his fever up past Jamie’s reckoning.  There was no need for concern, she told herself, and let Jamie draw water to soak her aching feet.

* * *

The second time, though, she’d had a full night’s sleep and Steve had gone a whole two months with nary a sniffle.  They were all at Coney Island—five kids with too much sugar in their veins and too much summer heat in their blood, Jamie and Becky’s dark heads bracketing Steve’s blond as they argued about which way to go, Alice and Nonie barely visible in the Saturday crowd, only their curly red hair impossible to lose.

The crowd didn’t stop girls from finding Jamie, though.  Sarah couldn’t blame them, really: Jamie had finally filled into his gangly limbs, and his clothes might have been hemmed and stained, but his dimples and his blue eyes could charm a girl right off her feet and onto her –

Well.  This was hardly the first girl who’d approached Jamie, unfazed by Becky and Steve’s identical scowls.  And Jamie smiled at her, cocked his head and looked her over, nice and slow; and Sarah hoped so hard it felt like praying.

Then Steve’s hand pressed lightly into the small of Jamie’s back, a quiet touch in the bustling crowd, but Sarah saw.  Saw Jamie’s smile subside, and watched the regretful tip of his head as he sent the girl away.

 _Why, I’m flattered_ , Sarah didn’t need to hear him say, _but I’m afraid I’m already spoken for._  She’d half-raised the lad, after all, and taught him how to mind his tongue.

She’d tried to teach Stevie, but the only tongues that boy minded were the ones wagging around him.

Alice and Nonie distracted her, tugging at her sleeves and asking for money to buy ice cream.  Sarah agreed.  Ice cream might not help the headache she could feel starting behind her eyes, but at least it would buy her some time.

She didn’t look at the older children as they walked away.  She didn’t want to think about what she had to do.

* * *

“It’s not right,” Sarah told Jamie, taking his arm after mass and praying for deliverance.  Alice had dragged Steve to the store for penny candy, and this might be Sarah’s only chance.

“The tie?” Jamie wondered, because the lad had a habit of never getting it quite straight.

Sarah closed her eyes and wished that she could do this with Steve instead, who would be indignant and not resigned, but she had taught Steve never to let anyone tell him what he couldn’t do.  And he couldn’t do this.

“Not the tie,” she whispered, her voice ragged.  She held a little tighter onto his arm.  “You and Stevie.”  Jamie stumbled, but kept his face forward and his eyes on the ground.  “This has to be the end of it,” she demanded, and Jamie swallowed hard.  He took a deep breath; Sarah listened to it catch in his throat and felt her own throat close, wishing her boys weren’t such damned fools.  “I won’t allow it,” she insisted.

Jamie looked at her then, hard and long from his blanched face and nearly colorless eyes.  But he inclined his head, finally, the barest hint of a nod.  “You’re the boss,” he ground out, biting back all the words she knew had stuck in his chest.

Sarah shook her head.  Steve’s words would have been angry, righteous and filled with rage.  Jamie leaned away from her, afraid that she might find him lacking and send him away.  “Just a mother,” she corrected him, and straightened his tie.

* * *

“What did you say to Bucky!” Steve shouted, slamming the door behind him, ruffling the table piled with flowers as he stormed in.  Sarah jumped, and nearly sliced off her thumb instead of the cabbage she was chopping for dinner.

Steve stomped over to the table, folding his arms and glowering down at her with fiery blue eyes.  Her youngest, impossible son.

“I know you said something to him, Ma.  About – well, about something.”  Steve looked away, his jaw clenched and his cheeks red.  “He won’t – he says it’s time he had a doll, a steady maybe.  And I know that ain’t Bucky,” he continued, getting louder and redder by the word, “so it’s gotta be -”

“Are you threatening me, Steven Grant?” Sarah asked tonelessly, her attention focused on the cabbage and her knife, sparing a glance at the table littered with daffodils and posies that might have come from their neighbors’ yards.  Flowers gathered and brought to her doorstep, unnecessary apologies that made Sarah’s heart ache in her chest.

Steve deflated immediately.  “No, ma’am,” he promised, collapsing into a chair and fixing his gaze on his fidgeting hands, a remorseful blush staining his cheeks.  It didn’t hide his reddened eyes, though, or the tears he’d scrubbed away.  “’m sorry, Ma.”

He picked at a splinter on the table, for a minute, and Sarah let him, dumping the cabbage into a pot and setting it on the stove, waiting for it to boil.

“He said it ain’t right!” Steve finally burst out, unable to hold the words in.  Sarah smiled sadly, head tilted toward the pot where Steve couldn’t see.  She knew her boys.  “And I don’t, I mean – You wouldn’t tell him that, would you Ma?  You wouldn’t.”

“It isn’t, though,” Sarah said, keeping her voice low.  Steve wouldn’t hear any steel tones but his own, and sometimes the set of Jamie’s jaw when he’d had enough.

“That’s a dirty lie!” Steve snapped, and then clapped a hand over his mouth and mumbled an apology.  He stretched his hands across the flower-strewn table, blue eyes widening to accompany his new pleading tone.  “You’re always talking about love, Ma, aren’t you?  About how it’s in the Bible, and how it’s what we’re supposed to do.  And Jamie loves me,” Steve swore, strident and unfaltering.  Sarah had never seen her child doubt Jamie, not once in a dozen years.  “He told me so.”

“I know he does,” Sarah agreed, and curled her tired hands around her son’s sweaty palms.  “He has for years now,” she said, and shut her eyes against the way Steve puffed up a little taller and grinned.

“Then it is right,” Steve declared.  He paused, bright enough to notice his mother’s grimace, and squeezed her hands while vowing, “You don’t need to protect me, Ma.  Not from Bucky.”

Sarah huffed, smiling weakly at her blond, bellicose boy.  “It’s not you I’m protecting.”

“What?”  Steve frowned, pulling his hands away and leaning back.  “I don’t understand.  If not me, then -”

“Jamie loves you,” Sarah interrupted, because she could never have been tired enough to miss that.  “And you—well, lad, you love that he loves you.”  Steve shook his head, though in denial or confusion it wasn’t clear.

“Isn’t that good?” he asked, and Sarah rubbed at her temples.

 _You asked Millie Harding to the movies and she laughed,_ Sarah didn’t say.   _She told you no one would want a crook-backed Mick who was deaf and wheezing to boot.  You brought Agnes MacDonnell flowers, and she asked if you were delivering them for your older brother, the dark-haired boy with the ice-blue eyes_.

“If Dolores -” two floors down, eighteen and gorgeous “- looked at you like Jamie does…”  Sarah trailed off, not wanting to ask what Steve would do.  Not wanting to know, because she was doing her best to protect them both.

Steve scuffed at the floor with his shoe, and stuck out his jaw.  “Wouldn’t mean nothin’,” he muttered, but he couldn’t meet her gaze.

“Don’t lie to me,” Sarah reprimanded him, gentle but firm.  “You’re in love with the way Jamie looks at you -” The way he’d looked at Steve since the boys were fifteen, like an angry Irish kid with a runny nose was his north star “- and the way he treats you like you’re the most important thing in his world.

“But one day,” she plowed on, determined to see this through, “someone else will look at you like that, and it’ll mean even more to you because they haven’t been there all along.  And you’ll leave him.”  Steve shook his head, hard, but his eyes were closed, and Sarah knew he was angry only with himself.  “You’ll leave him, lad, because: being wanted?  That’ll happen again, and it’ll be someone else’s eyes and hands doing the wanting.  That’s not one of a kind.

“But Jamie?”  And he opened his eyes and gave her half a watery smile, because they both loved Jamie, even if Steve didn’t love his best friend the way Jamie loved him.  “Jamie is one of a kind.  And he deserves someone who wants to hold onto that, to catch him because there’s no one else like him in the world, and there never will be.”

Steve nodded easily, then bit his bottom lip and flushed at his next words.  “But what if there isn’t anybody else?” he wondered, a plaintive cry from a little boy who had yet to make any friends.  “What if it’s just Buck, who looks at me like that?”

“It won’t be,” Sarah promised, because both her boys deserved to be loved for all that they were.  “And even if it was,” she added, when Steve didn’t look reassured, “would you ruin his chances at finding someone who loved him, just so he’d keep looking at you with stars in his eyes?”

“Nah,” Steve muttered, his gruffness at odds with the catch in his voice, brushing his fingers gently over a pile of slender tulip stems.  “Guess I’d better go tell him you don’t hate him, before he brings you the whole darn flower shop.”

He kissed Sarah’s forehead, on his way out, and she let him go.  She went to the window, watching her scrawny child vanish down the block, and wished that one day he’d open his eyes and realize that he treated Jamie like the sun—the brightest point in his world, easy to ignore when it was always there.

It would take him awhile, Sarah admitted, muffling her persistent cough in her handkerchief.  But that was fine.  She would be there to make sure that her two boys found each other in the end.

(Sarah knew that Steve wouldn’t see Jamie til he believed he’d lost him - only she had thought that would be when Jamie finally got himself a steady girl, and not when one of her boys reached out his hand for the other … and missed.)

* * *

“She doesn’t hate you,” Steve had said, snorting when Bucky ignored him and plucked Mr. Hannigan’s violets straight out of the ground instead.  “Well, handing her a passel of roots and dirt won’t help,” he’d added, sobering when Bucky had turned to face him, desperation in his eyes.

“You’re telling me she told you _this_ -” and he had flicked his gaze between them, through air that Steve could feel against suddenly overheated skin “- was right, after all?”

Steve had gnawed on his lower lip, dropping his head when he couldn’t meet Bucky’s eyes.  “It ain’t - it ain’t what she meant,” he had finally stuttered, unable to tell Buck what his Ma _had_ meant.  Unable to face what the world would look like, if he told Bucky and lost the only friend he had.  “Just trust me, Buck,” he’d pleaded, stretching a hand out to catch his friend’s shoulder.  “It ain’t about you at all.  It ain’t about this.”

And that had been the end of it - Sarah’s edict tucked away with all the other things they didn’t say, the kisses they didn’t share and the love Steve pretended he didn’t see in Bucky’s eyes.

Then he’d met Peggy, and thought about how his Ma had been right all along.  Right about everything, he realized, sitting alone in the shell of the bar - the shell of his own body, clumsy with grief. He had known for years that Bucky was one of a kind, but knowing hadn’t made Steve quick enough to hold on.

* * *

“Why would I hate you?” Bucky - James, the man the Winter Soldier had left behind - asked quietly, frowning at Steve’s miserable attempt to confess how poorly he had loved Bucky, and for how long.

“Ma said you deserved better than I gave you,” Steve confessed, voice rough with the years he’d spent alone, in this new world, gazed at by women and men alike, heartsick for the one man who’d mattered.  “She was right.”  He had to pause to swallow.  “And instead of telling you, I let you think she wanted to scare you away.”   _I failed you_ , he didn’t say, ducking his head and pressing his palms hard against the bony sockets around his eyes.   _I failed you so many times, and you know that I dropped you and that I left you behind, but I let you love me for years without realizing that I loved you so much it hurts_.

“You’re upset,” James diagnosed, still relearning how to classify his own emotions, much less anyone else’s.

Steve nodded in confirmation, then shook his head.  He was guilty, and sorry, and angry at himself for being so blind, and angry that so many people had hurt Bucky for so long, and grieving the loss of Bucky’s love all over again.  Then he shrugged, and tried to smile, because there was no way to articulate all those things to James, and no point in trying.

“You’re upset,” James repeated, his lips pursed and sticking out the way they always had when he was baffled or concentrating hard.  “Because Mrs. Rogers loved me, and you didn’t tell me?  Or because you loved me?”  He stretched out his right hand to card fingers through Steve’s hair, because he had decided weeks ago that he liked Steve’s hair: something about the color or the texture kept him grounded, and Steve was selfish enough to encourage this one thing.

“Well,” Steve grumbled, pulling his hands from his eyes and blinking the blurriness away, “it sounds stupid when you say it like that.  And I’m sure Ma _still_ loves you, wherever she is, and I do, too.  So don’t -”

Strong, gun-callused fingers tugged his head up, and Steve’s throat clogged at the light in Bucky’s - James’s face.  “Can’t help you sounding stupid,” he said, with a lopsided grin that Steve wanted to paint on the insides of his eyes.  “What did Ma -” a habit he’d always had, forgetting to call her Mrs. Rogers when Steve always called her Ma, pieces of Bucky in everything although James insisted he had fallen too far to still be whole “- think I deserved, then?”

“To be loved for who you are,” Steve whispered, thinking of their tiny kitchen and his mother’s thin hands.  “To find someone who couldn’t let you go, because they knew there was no one like you in the world.”

James raised his eyebrows, considering, as he looked around their apartment, the space Steve had filled with music and boxing gloves and strange kitchen tools and anything else James decided he wanted to try.  The home Steve had build around them, after wearing himself to exhausted illness searching for a ghost.  James looked at Steve, with James’s right hand in his hair, and the plates of his left hand clasped between Steve’s palms.  “Seems like I found _someone_ who does all that,” James drawled, sarcasm glinting in his faded blue eyes.  “But didn’t she say anything about the sex?”

Steve blanched, appalled at the idea of his Ma saying anything about sex, but then Bucky - James - the most important man in Steve’s world tugged Steve close, and this time neither of them let go.


End file.
